Wireless Network Quality Help

How many of your 23 devices are wireless? Consumer-grade routers are probably really not great for more than a few devices at a time.
It sounds like the quality really drops off quickly with distance and/or any obstructions.

Before replacing the router (which still may help a lot), I also see you are using mostly USB adapters. These tend to have notoriously bad antennas. You might replace ONE of them on one problematic system with a decent (i.e. $30-$35, not $10-$15) PCIe X1 adapter, and see if it helps a lot.

Edit: at work, most media-sharing sites are blocked, so I won't be able to see your screen shot until I get home. Perhaps another person will be able to comment on it before then.

Hmmm, 54Mb/s is wireless "G" speed; "N" should be faster.

That is interesting that you can see quality on your device that is not on all most show signal strength which is something very different. You can have very strong signal but still get poor service

The list of channels from the screen cap you have is very telling. It shows 16AP on channel 1 and 8AP on channel 6. This means you have a huge number of other people using wireless fairly close to you. Interference is likely the cause of your quality problems. The general fix is to select another channel but I suspect even channel 11 which is not shown also has lots of AP on it. With everyone setting their routers to auto they hop around stomping on each other all looking for the least crowded channel. Unfortunately there is no fix for this.....pay all your neighbors to move away...

When it is as crowded as you have you likely will get some benifit buying dual band equipment and trying the 5g band. The 5g band does not penetrate as far which means less neighbors signal gets into your house...it also means less of your signal will go though your floors and walls also. Still a weaker but less error signal will give you much better throughput than a strong signal that is getting lots of errors because of interference.

technically no, you can go to 1000mw but transmit power also must include the antenna gain. This is almost a magic art for these guys who design microwave transmitters/amplifiers. The efficiency and ability to only increase the wanted signal but not the noise decreases the more you increase the power. Many time turning up the power will make your signal stronger but you get less actual throughput because of errors.

The question is always do you get the 1000mw with a 250mw amplifier and a 6db gain antenna or do I use a 500mw amplifier and a 3db gain antenna.

Pretty much you can assume products from major manufactures all transmit at maximum legal power. In fact when you look them up in the FCC database even very inexpensive ones transmit at maximum power. Only ones that don't are battery powered hotspots.

The reason the power is adjustable is so you can REDUCE the power. You sometime need this when you have lots of radio equipment that you control and you want to avoid interfering with yourself.

Your problem is not the transmit power....well unless you can turn your neighbors power down.

The router you posted is 802.11ac. 802.11ac alone will not solve your issue. It will though allow you to use the 5g bands which your current router does not. You would need nic cards that at least support 5g band and 802.11ac if want to use it.

802.11ac causes a new interfering neighbor issue. There are about 9 independent 20mhz channels (no including the radar ones) in the 5g band (unlike the 3 in 2.4g). This means you should be able the have 9 people each have their own channel and if 2 happen to use the same one you would hope they are far enough away that the signal does not interfere a lot. Problem is like 802.11n that can use 40mhz channels (this is 150m means) 802.11ac uses 80mhz of bandwidth. ie 4 channels. This means only 2 people can share without interfering on the 5g. The new version of 802.11ac coming in the fall uses 160mhz...ie 8 channels. So one user can use all the bandwidth and anyone close to them will be interfered with.

Wireless "used" to be so nice before everyone else jumped in and started to use it

If you are going 802.11ac I would go with the newer generation of 802.11ac like the ac68u or maybe the netgear nighthawk or even the tplink archer c7. These all are using the finalized standard from last november. Router produced before are considered "draft" 802.11ac routers and do not 100% support all the features. Of course there is another generation coming this fall that has the 160mhz support.

If you like asus I would buy the n66u and wait on the 802.11ac unless a lot of your equipment already has 802.11ac nics in them. 802.11ac is mostly used for more speed within the house. It does not by itself increase the range or signal quality it just mostly changes the way the data is encoded into the signal and of course how many radio channels it uses.

Try to force your router to use only 20mhz bands and force it to channel 1. The long blue line means you are running 40mhz so you double your chance of interference since both the users using channel 6 and the users using channel 11 are conflicting with you.

Changing to 20mhz means you will likely only get a max speed of 150m rather than 300m but 150m that works well is much better than 300m that work poorly.